Front Burner - B.C. admits harm in multimillion-dollar settlement for victims of disgraced social worker

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

While Robert Riley Saunders worked as a social worker in British Columbia, he was supposed to provide care and guardianship to some of the province’s most vulnerable foster children. Instead, he is alleged to have stolen from them, leaving many to fend for themselves. Now, the B.C. government has reached a proposed multimillion dollar settlement for more than 100 of his former clients, admitting harm done by their ex-employee. Today, CBC reporter Jason Proctor walks us through the extraordinary case, and how it reveals cracks in a system that is supposed to keep young people safe.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Josh Bloch. They were some of British Columbia's most vulnerable foster children, so the province assigned them a social worker, Robert Riley Saunders, to act as a kind of guardian.

He's alleged to have robbed them, leaving many to fend for themselves on the streets. And this went on, unchecked, for nearly 20 years. Now the B.C. government has reached a proposed multi-million dollar settlement for more than 100 of his former clients, admitting harm done by their ex-employee. Today, CBC reporter Jason Proctor walks us through the extraordinary case and how it reveals cracks in a system that's supposed to keep young people safe. This is FrontBurner. Jason, hello.

Hi, Josh. I want to start by asking you, what role was Robert Riley Saunders supposed to be playing in these kids' lives? away from their parents. And so the role that Robert Riley Saunders would have played in that process would be as a guardianship social worker. And so what that sort of means is basically he's acting as kind of a de facto parent for these children, whether they're in foster care, kind of an independent living situation, whatever, it would be responsible for the guardianship decisions of the child throughout that child's stay in care. Plus, there's this class action lawsuit that the province is now settling. But broadly, rather than just providing care and guardianship, what is the pattern of behavior he's accused of here? Yeah, so, I mean, the province has, as part of proposing this settlement to the class action lawsuit, has admitted in broad strokes that Robert Riley Saunders misappropriated funds, that he harmed the children. And the broad pattern of behavior is that essentially instead of giving them or providing

to them the money that was supposed to be going towards their care, whether it be rent, gift cards, anything like that, that he took it for himself. That, you know, in some cases, he opened joint bank accounts with the kids and siphoned it away. And as a result, he failed to care for them and basically left them to fend for themselves, you know, in ways that saw them exposed to all manner of deprivation. So whether it's homelessness, you know, sexual exploitation, addiction, and the province has said this happened. I should say that all the victims in this case are either minors now or they were minors when they were in the care of Saunders. So we're not going to be using their full names. One of your colleagues spoke to a young woman back in 2018 who had been assigned to Saunders when she was 15 years old.

What did she say happened to her? Yeah, so, you know, she had been in foster care at the time. She said she met Riley Saunders everybody calls him Riley um and you know at first he seemed to be uh kind of pleasant and you know into it we did get along you know he played the role like he was supposed to um but it only took a couple of weeks for him to I want to say lose interest in doing his job properly. So yeah, I learned very quickly that he didn't care. She was in this foster care situation at the time that she said started to go kind of sour. He didn't really do anything. And so she was left to figure it out for herself, ends up sleeping, you know, with friends, that kind of a thing.

He comes back into her life at some point with what's sort of an independent living situation. So, you know, when a kid's not in foster care, but they're sort of going to be paying rent to live independently, but still under the guardianship of the state. And he had brought me to Interior Savings to open a bank account. And he had told me that the bank account was going to be between the ministry and myself. But very soon, just suddenly, she says he said they don't want you anymore. Riley had told me that the people who I was doing the independent living with no longer wanted me there, which I thought was kind of strange because I thought I had a good

relationship with them. And so they took her to a homeless shelter where she says everything started to go awfully for her. I was feeling very alone, you know, unwanted, confused, angry, sad. And I had been sexually exploited while being at the homeless shelter. And with everything that was occurring in my life i had turned to drugs to help me cope and kind of forget about you know what i was going through and so she ends up uh in in the community that she's in living by the river i lived in a stick hut that i had made for myself by a river. That was probably one of the darkest times of my entire life.

It was extremely terrifying. I was constantly on edge. You know, is someone going to steal my stuff? Am I going to get, you know, hurt? I was very depressed. I was anxious. I was very depressed I was anxious um and it wasn't until actually shortly before these lawsuits uh were launched that she realized you know she said there was as much as forty thousand dollars that should have been provided to her care and instead she got nothing wow I was shocked it was it was extremely hard for me to believe that it was, you know, looked over.

You know, like it just wasn't being paid attention to, which it's a really gross feeling knowing that it happened for so long to so many of us. So I should say that Riley Saunders has not responded to any of the allegations against him, and there has been no criminal charges laid against him as of yet. But this is one of the alleged patterns, that Saunders would remove kids from some kind of foster care or independent living, and they would be receiving these government checks, but then once they were removed, he would continue to keep it, allegedly?

Yeah, exactly. That he would siphon it away for himself. And, you know, we heard this in, I spoke with both one of his former kids that was in his care and a foster father actually who had dealt with this kid and you know this is another just a tragic story um steven uh is the name of the young man and his his foster former foster parent uh as a guy named craig so steven uh had been in the foster care system since he was six he was troubled young guy, ended up having to leave Craig's foster home when he was 17. I mean, you know, but he still relied on them as a support. And, you know, the kid couldn't pay his rent. And he said he was never given a rent check or things like work boots. There were times where I would be needing a pair of snow boots and he'd phone my boss, for instance, and say, he doesn't need snow boots.

He just put his in a bush, right? So he could write extra amounts of money. And so, you know, he turned to his foster father for support. The foster father asked Riley Saunders what was happening. And he says he was told that, hey, the rent money had been provided. his foster father for support the foster father asked riley saunders what was happening and he says he was told that hey the rent money had been provided and the work boots were there but you know that he saw steven toss them in the bush um and so craig says who are you going to believe in that situation the kind of smooth nice professional social worker or your foster son who you love but who is struggling with

drug addiction these kids have issues to start like they didn't come into care not broken and then the system breaks them worse lots of people would have helped steven if the ministry wasn't helping i would have helped i would have got help i would have got help for him but i thought he had it and i thought he was turning it down and And so all these years later, you know, Craig says he ended up weeping when he heard about these allegations against Riley Saunders, because, you know, it meant that his foster son, Stephen, had been telling the truth. And, you know, Stephen is saying that he saw all kinds of things blamed on him. He felt caught up in these lies. And, you know, you just feel like you are living in this upside down world. And the kind of reverberations of this, the kind of fallout from this lasts, you know, years and years later.

No matter what we did and no matter, like, even if we didn't do it, we still got blamed for it. Years and years later. He apologized to me because of Riley Saunders, because of some of the things he said, but because he didn't believe a word I said. You know, that kid is broken and it breaks me every day, you know, because I did that to him, too. It wasn't just Riley, you know, and everybody did it. I'll see you next time. entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. You know, reading through those court filings, there were so many of these heartbreaking accounts from kids who say that Saunders took advantage of the fact that other people wouldn't believe them. You know, if this is true, it sounds like he was really playing off the stigma of kids in care, that they're somehow bad or not trustworthy. Yeah, I think that's what many of the people involved in this case, both lawyers and advocates have said, is this is the problem, is these kids felt that they didn't matter.

They were used to not being listened to. And so many of them may not have complained because they felt that they wouldn't be listened to. You know, while being in his care, I was constantly told that, you know, no one cares, no one will listen, no one will believe you. So in my head, there was no point. And in my head, like, it was kind of like, okay, you just need to move on and get on with your life because nobody cares. And you end up seeing this kind of vicious circle, I guess. And there's big questions about

why aren't these kids listened to? Why weren't they listened to? How was this able to go on for so long? And certainly, given that there's been 102 young people recognized as being eligible for this class action lawsuit payout, 85 of them are Indigenous. And there is a glaring question here about the degree to which some type of systemic racism played a part in allowing that to happen. In these systems that are supposed to be in place to serve people. But when it comes to being an Indigenous person in this country, it's totally the opposite. He was operating in a system where there's supposed to be checks and balances. Why is it that he felt confident

that if you want to rip off somebody, try the Aboriginal kids? And how could he have done that? No one was paying attention. To your point, Saunders is also accused of failing to take steps to preserve the cultural identity of the children in his care, right? Yeah, and this is actually the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit speaks exactly to this issue. This is a girl who is still actually in care. She's been part of social worker when she was six, and he's accused of failing to ensure that she remained culturally connected to her band. And I mean, they wanted to keep in touch with her.

There was outreach. They wanted her sent back to Saskatchewan for a naming and welcoming ceremony. They wanted her to get to know her extended family. You know, beyond that as well, he's also accused of failing to give support to the non-Indigenous foster parents that she had in BC, you know, giving them the books, the materials, the resources that they wanted to keep those connections going. And so he's accused of just showing no interest in her whatsoever, and particularly no interest in her cultural heritage and her indigenous ancestry and history, which provides so much strength for the kids in care. And to lose touch with that is incalculable.

It took a very long time for me to start trusting people again because he was the one person that was supposed to be there for me and help me support me everything and he didn't. But over time, I realized that it's, you know, it's not other people that are the problem. It was him. So I had to grow from that. So I mentioned earlier that Riley Saunders hasn't responded to any of these allegations. Why not? You know, that's anybody's guess right now. This all kind of exploded in the filing of a class action lawsuit. And I actually received a copy of the class action lawsuit the sort of night it went public. Went onto his Facebook page at the time. Within hours, all of the pictures on that Facebook page had vanished. It had been shut off to the public.

He has never responded publicly to this. From what we know, the lawyers, because there's the class action, and there's also individual lawsuits against him, they've had trouble tracking him down. Nobody has been able to serve him with these documents, according to the lawyers. And so, you know, his whereabouts are just unknown. And he hasn't been criminally charged. Could that change? It could. What's happened is the RCMP have mounted an investigation into his actions.

Remember, I mean, there's serious allegations here of fraud, of misappropriation of funds. I mean, just in the basics of his employment record, according to the court record, you know, when he applied for a job back in 1996, he provided the BC government with a certificate saying he had a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Manitoba. That turns out to have been faked. And so, you know, there's fraud alleged. The results of that investigation have been turned over to BC's prosecution service. And now we're waiting to see whether they'll make the decision to charge or not. So the province is proposing compensation for the harm inflicted on the young people that were in Saunders Care.

What do we know about how all of this has impacted their lives? Well, you know, what we've heard from them is that they've wound up in serious situations of neglect. Some have been sexually exploited. Some have been homeless. Some have been physically abused. They've lost, you know, educational opportunities. And as I mentioned, many have lost touch with abilities to connect with their indigenous roots and culture. And so what the province has proposed here is that anybody who was in his care for 90 days or more, starting April 2001 until he left in 2018, should get $25,000, no questions asked. There's an additional $44,000 on top of that for Indigenous claimants. And then there's going to be kind of an adjudication

panel set up, and all with a view to try not to re-traumatize the children as they go through this. But basically, that's to determine amounts up to an additional $181,000, depending on what happened to them in terms of sexual exploitation, homelessness, abuse, all of those things. And how do the people that were once in his care feel about this idea of just putting a price tag on the harm that was done to them? You know, I spoke with Stephen, the young man I mentioned earlier, who, you know, found himself homeless and, you know, addicted to drugs and not believed as a result of this. I mean, money is one thing, but it can't get you back your childhood. It can't get you back all those things you didn't have. It's a lot of free money, I understand.

But we had to deal with Riley for what? Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Over fourteen years. And that 14-year period of getting treated like dogs, it's like 69,000, I'm going to fix it? It's had a huge impact on these kids, a huge impact. And no one will ever know what impact it had. Like, what if Stephen, what if instead of being homeless and getting thrown in jail that day when he left our place,

what if Riley actually had given him rent and he did get a job? We also know that some of the former clients are no longer with us. Yeah, we don't know a lot about this, but the province has identified two kids that would have been eligible for these payouts, and they're dead. So, you know, it's easy to look at this guy and what he's allegedly done and think, okay, good, you know, at least he's been fired. Thank goodness he's not in the system anymore. But people familiar with this case suggest that there's actually wider systemic issues here at play. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? a woman named Cheryl Casimer, who is with the political executive of the First Nations Summit here in BC. And, you know, this is the question she has, is why did this happen in the way it happened? Is it still going on? Because if we don't address the systemic racism within

the system, then, you know, there could be other Riley Saunders out there. This has come to light because he got caught. There are probably things happening right now where people are still getting away with things because they've yet to be caught. Because the system is broken and the system allowed for this. I should say, I mean, I've asked the ministry about this and they say, you know, there is systemic racism in the system. They can't say the degree to which that might have played a role in this. But I mean, there's also no doubt that there were financial controls that were lacking here. controls all the way down to the individual auditing processes where Riley Saunders were working that meant that checks and balances weren't followed. So, you know, they've tightened those things up. But I mean, you know, that deeper question about systemic racism in a system in which Indigenous children are vastly overrepresented is really concerning.

Indigenous children are vastly overrepresented is really concerning. Well, and I guess there's also this question of how it could go on for so long. Robert Riley Saunders was employed from 2001 to 2018. You know, what's their response to how he was able to allegedly do this for so long? We don't really know the extent of how this all happened and how it worked. As I say, they say they've taken various measures, they've had various audits done, they've done internal investigations to find out, but those have largely not been shared, you know, in their full detail with the public. But, you know, we know from the court filings there were flags in this before, you know, a simple check, as I mentioned before, of his educational credentials would have shown that

his bachelor's degree was a fake. In 2004, there was a letter on his file warning of some type of fiduciary conflict of interest. There was also a work assessment early in his career that saw him flagged as, you know, being kind of indifferent to questions about Indigenous culture and history, not particularly interested in that. And so, you know, as I say, there were certainly apparently flags there, but whether it's because, you know, the litigation is ongoing or because there may be some type of a criminal proceeding coming up, we haven't seen an airing of that. And that's a question I think many people have around this is, is it possible to have some type of public inquiry or a greater kind of airing of what exactly happened here. I was going to ask you, what else have you heard from people involved in this case about what they want to see come out of this?

It is tricky because I think, again, the woman I mentioned before with the political executive of the First Nations Summit, Cheryl Casimer, supports an inquiry, but is very concerned about putting these young people through all the trauma that they've already suffered as a result of these deprivations. They would have to relive what that was again in order to be able to qualify for that funding. So we need to, as a society and as a leadership council organization, as First Nation leaders, we need to make sure that there are supports in place for these young people. What did Stephen tell you about what he hopes comes from this? What he's hoping is that the next time anything like this happens,

that maybe the first instinct won't be to say, well, they're probably lying. I hope they really take an account too. When other youth are saying things to them, and instead of just saying that we're lying and that they don't believe us and they look the other way, maybe they'll listen to one of the foster kids that are telling them that they're not lying and maybe that they'll realize in the end that maybe they hired someone that wasn't applicable for the job. And I hope that it's just hope that this doesn't happen again.

It's such a tragic story. Thank you for your reporting on this, and thank you for speaking with me today. Oh, thank you very much. That's all for today. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.